66 . . . "ART" Alan Aida Victor Garber Alfred Molina A new play by Yasmina Reza Translated by Christopher Hampton Directed by Matthew Warchus CALL TELECHARGE: (212) 239 6200 Outside Metro New York: (800) 432 7250 Groups: (212) 398 8383 . (800) 223 7565 ROYALE THEATRE 242 West 45th Street . .. " THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 23 & MARCH 2. 1998 came in, you couldn't be over thirty-two." Between 1993 and 1996, Batz contin- ued, the department suffered two deaths. One of them, he claimed, involved a fire- fighter who "was given the job on the basis of his blackness, and two to three years later he was given a lieutenancy on the basis of his blackness." According to Batz, the lieutenant "broke three of the cardinal rules when you show up at a fire: his turnout coat was wide open, his gloves were not on, and he stood upright. He was hit by a backdraft, probably two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. He didn't know what he was doing, and he essentially killed himself" I confessed that I was skeptical about whether one's score on a written exam was an accurate predictor of one's performance as a firefighter. But the fire- fighters energetically defended the tests. "They are extremely job-related," said a twenty-year veteran, who asked me not to use his name. "They used to range from the use of ladders to water supply to dis- tinguishing between one nozzle and an- other. When 1 first applied to be a fire- fighter, I put together a study group in my home, and we started studying a year and a half prior to the examinations." In 1990, when it came time to take an exam for promotion, the tests had been watered down so much that, he said, "I studied three hours for one and one week for the other-it was that meaningless." The soft-spoken chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, Robert L. Demmons, is an African-American committed to diversity in the ranks. When I repeated the white firefight- ers' charges, he paused to collect him- self before replying. Then he said, with still scarcely controlled fury, "What that speaks to me of is racial supremacy. One African-American gets killed on the job and all of a sudden it's because the standards were lowered to get in. This was one of the most capable individ- uals that I've seen in my career in this d " epartment. Regaining his composure, Demmons told me his own story. In the nineteen- seventies, he took entrance and promo- tional tests that, he later heard through the grapevine, had repeat questions, whose answers were leaked to white fire- fighters through the old-boy network. As head of the black firefighters' associa- tion, he had challenged the tests as ra- cially discriminatory, and that challenge led to the adoption of the consent decree. But, now that the decree has expired, Demmons is concerned that Proposi- tion 209 will make it impossible for the department to maintain its current proportion of women and minorities, who continue to get lower test scores. In response to Proposition 209, Dem- mons's staff has drafted a plan that would deëmphasize written exams. "Let's just face the real fact," Demmons said confidingl "What does the job of firefighter require? Are we talking about a nuclear physicist?" According to a draft of Demmons's plan, which is still being revised, each of the projected twenty thousand applicants to the Fire Department each year would be invited to join an unpaid "cadet program." Ad- mission would be determined by demon- strating minimum competency on a writ- ten reading-comprehension exam, ten- tatively to be scored on a pass/fail basis. Candidates who passed the written exam would progress to an oral interview and a physical test, and then attend a series of training classes. Department officials would have tremendous discretion to choose among the cadets, on the basis of such vague criteria as "interest in firefight- ing and commitment to the department." I asked Mayor Brown, too, about the angry white firefighters who maintained that the new recruits couldn't tell the dif- ference between one nozzle and another and had endangered their colleagues by calling for the wrong hose. "Tests are ba- sically unfair," the Mayor said, with some passion. "If you've not been part of the mainstream culture, a test cannot effec- tively measure your level of ability, skill, and intellect. It would be like me taking a test in Beijing." Brown energetically defended Chief Demmons's proposal to eliminate ranked written tests. "Every- body ought to be able to follow the same nozzle process," he declared. "But you're talking about a kid who comes from a different culture. He won't know what the hell you're talking about when you , 1 ,,, say nozz e. I T will be ironic if Proposition 209 re- sults in the abolition of civil-service exams, which were adopted during the Progressive era to insure that public-